As a generalist, I reserve the right to indulge in sharp changes of subject.

I'll excuse this one by pointing out that, if democracy actually is nonsense, we're suffering from a serious truth deficit. 9/11 Truthers are one thing - but when you start questioning 7/4, you're into some heavy alternate reality. Here at UR, Philip K. Dick is always in the house.

So: a social verifier is an institution, authority, Web 2.0 server, etc, etc, which collects and distributes information that its users trust.

Wikipedia is a social verifier. So is the Catholic Church. So is the New York Times. So is UC Berkeley. So are Reddit, Digg, and the new Hacker News (the trusted information being "this link is cool.") So is the scientific peer-review system. And so on.

This is a pretty wide range. Is the concept overgeneralized? Is there anything interesting we can say about all these systems in general? What could Digg and the Catholic Church possibly have in common?

Well, one possibility is that they both suck. No disrespect to Diggers or Catholics, but neither of these systems looks much like the kind of social verifier I'd like to see. Nothing like my dream SV exists, in fact. And I wish it did.

So on the off chance that any coders with a few spare cycles are reading UR, I thought I'd describe this system. Perhaps someone would be nice enough to build it. Unlike the rotary system (which is a joke, folks), it's not patented. At least, not by me.

But it needs a name, so let's call it Uberfact. Of course, who builds it gets to name it, but any system which follows this general design can advertise itself as uberfactious.

Uberfact, or any uberfactious SV, has three unusual features. One, it makes no attempt to separate fact from opinion. Two, its reputation system is factional. Three, its ambitions are unlimited.

Typical SVs today, such as Wikipedia or the New York Times, invest great effort in separating fact from opinion (see La Wik's NPOV page). Terms such as "objective" are popular.

In my opinion, this reflects a fact which is quite central to Western history, but is seldom expressed as such. The fact is that information is power. In the democratic era this is explicit: who commands public opinion commands the State. Before democracy it wasn't quite this simple, but ideas have always mattered. Anyone who can persuade others to share his or her opinions is powerful by definition, and very likely dangerous.

The attraction of depoliticized information, of objective truth, is obvious. Facts threaten no one. How could they? An opinion is an interpretation of reality, not an argument with it.

And so the democratic state, which after all is a state and must defend itself like any other, tends to favor objective SVs over those which propagate explicit perspective. Democratic society has integrated this bias so perfectly that it's hard to imagine life without it.

For example, racism is widespread in Western society. Or at least it supposedly is. And it certainly once was. So why isn't there, or wasn't there, a racist TV channel? Surely, in our brave new world of 300 channels, there's enough audience for Confederate Racist Television? Can you imagine the six o'clock news on CRT?

If you can't, you can visit the web site "South Africa Sucks," which I refuse to link to - if you Google it, you will see why. Perhaps CRT's anchorman would be someone like SAS's "The Uhuru Guru." Can you imagine a world in which a child could start in racist kindergarten, continue through racist elementary to racist college, then go to racist journalism school and become a racist reporter for CRT? Which might be part of a whole racist media empire?

If you happen to be a racist yourself, perhaps you find this prospect enticing. Try replacing "racist" with "Communist," "terrorist" or "jihadi." There are indeed terrorist kindergartens in the world, but fortunately none of them are in New Jersey. At least not yet.

This is why the idea of "objectivity" is so critical to the democratic system. By attacking opinion and perspective in general, it suppresses all kinds of thought, but the thoughts it suppresses best are the most unusual, and therefore the most dangerous. If your goal is to eliminate POV from Wikipedia, for example, the hardest kind of POV to eliminate is the POV of the mainstream status quo.

So a tradition of neutrality has the inevitable effect of centralizing and standardizing opinion. A European or American intellectual of 1907 would be shocked and appalled by the society of 2007 in many ways, but I think his general impression would be one of great mental conformity. It's much easier to find popular opinions of 1907 that have no living parallel in 2007, than the reverse. (Gay rights is the only major innovation I can think of.) The process of memetic extinction is quite advanced.

But note that I am thinking in just the same way as the partisans of objectivity. I am describing the aggregate social impact of neutralist social verifiers. Actually, on balance, I think this impact is positive, because I really have no desire to live in a city where there's a racist kindergarten on one side of town and a terrorist kindergarten on the other. (At least not if that city has a single democratic government.)

For Uberfact, what really matters is that objectivity is not what users want.

As a user, what I want from Uberfact is an infinite extension of my own personality. If I ask Uberfact some question Q, the best answer I can possibly receive is the answer I myself would produce, if I had infinite time to research Q and knew all the information that anyone knows about it.

For example, if my question is "where was George W. Bush born?", an objective SV like Wikipedia will give me a very reliable answer. But if my question is "is George W. Bush a tyrant?", I am SOL.

Wikipedia cannot possibly answer this question. And if it even came close to trying, I would have no reason at all to trust it. The answer would simply reflect the collective opinion of La Wik's admins. I'm sure the admins are great people, but why should I care what they think?

What I want to know is: if I knew everything that anyone knows about George W. Bush, and everything that anyone knows about the history and etymology of the word "tyrant," would I decide that the former is a case of the latter? Surely, if Uberfact can answer this question - and answer it with a mouse click, not a week of research - merely objective questions, like where the tyrant was born, will be no sweat at all.

So if Uberfact can solve both of these problems - if it can deliver the goods both subjective and objective - it can simply walk past the epistemological landmine of distinguishing the two. As an Uberfact user, what I get is my interpretation of reality.

Can Uberfact do better than this? Yes, in fact, it can.

Suppose my interpretation of reality is bad? Suppose I am simply wrong? Suppose my opinions are stupid? Well, of course, most people with stupid opinions are perfectly happy to live with them. Indeed they tend to insist on it.

But some of us are so crazy that we actually like to improve our understanding of the world. Uberfact would certainly be defective if it didn't assist in this process.

Therefore, Uberfact should tell me not just what I think, but what others think. I should be able to see everyone's interpretation of why George W. Bush is, or isn't, a tyrant. Who knows - maybe they're right and I'm wrong.

I've piled a lot of feature requests onto this product. I haven't said anything about how they're implemented. The MRD is getting fat and nasty. It takes all day to come out of the printer. How, exactly, can Uberfact produce these magical services?

Enter the world of factional reputation.

The error that most reputation systems make, I think, is that they assume a homogeneous and unstructured reputation environment. The natural impulse of any good programmer is to generalize and simplify. So we see SVs in which every user has a trustworthiness bit (like Wikipedia's admin flag), or a trust rating / karma as in many discussion boards, or even if you get really fancy a trust graph of who trusts who else, a la PageRank.

None of these has anything to do with the social structures that human groups actually form. Humans are what primatologists call a party-gang species, which means exactly what it sounds like. We have a seemingly irresistible urge to form violent alliances. For the human male, there's really nothing as fun as getting a bunch of the guys together, swimming across the river, ambushing the two-legged scum who live there, burning their village and enslaving their children. And the human female is even worse.

Furthermore, a graph is a somewhat obtuse representation of the reputation system within these gangs. Sure, every tree is a graph, but if all your graphs are trees, use a tree. Human status systems are without exception hierarchical. They have regal aristocrats at the top, arrogant henchmen right below them, and so on down to cringing, boot-licking peasants.

The whole idea of democracy, which of course comes out of Protestant Christianity, is that we can defeat these tendencies, and emerge into the Millennium, the New Jerusalem in which all are equal. Well, possibly. It would certainly be nice. If you find anywhere that I can place a bet on this one, please let me know.

The idea of factional reputation is that, at least while the New Socialist Man is still stuck at version 0.43, we can actually work with human nature as it is, not as it should be, and build Uberfact around these notorious primate pathologies.

First, we are going to compromise Uberfact's feature space a little. It will only work, at least work well, for those of us who are basically conformists. For example, I am a formalist and a neocameralist, and while there may be one or two of the former by now, I am quite sure I'm the only one of the latter. So Uberfact won't work for me, or for other eccentric weirdos.

Second, Uberfact will only answer questions which many other people who think like you care about. If you are the only Sufi who cares whether the Yankees are better than the Mets, Uberfact cannot help you.

Notice these group labels. In Uberfact, these are called factions. Factions are groups of people who see the world in the same way. Factions may form on any issue and for any reason - progressive vs. conservative, Ford vs. Chevy, emacs vs. vi.

Any user can have a reputation in as many factions as he likes. But reputation in one faction has no meaning to another faction. To a Ford-lover, it means nothing that you're a highly rated libertarian. What do you know about limited-slip differentials? Jack. Until you prove otherwise.

Every contribution to Uberfact must be associated with a faction, and it is judged by that faction and that faction only. If the contribution is good, it improves your local reputation within that faction. If I have something to share about Ezra Pound, I have to decide whether I'm saying it as a modernist, a postmodernist, a New Critic, etc, etc.

Factions are self-constituting - they are responsible for their own reputation algorithms. Anyone can start a new faction for any reason, but generally they form by the usual process of human group formation - one group gets too large and quarrelsome, and splits into parts. The faction's founders constitute and manage its reputation system.

For example, early in Uberfact's development, there would probably be a libertarian faction. This would then fragment into Rothbardian, Randian, and Kochian libertarians - at least. Various strongly-flavored personalities might spin off their own little factions, and so on.

As a user of Uberfact, you have access to all content produced by all factions. Your process for answering a question, such as "is George W. Bush a tyrant," is in two steps. One, figure out what faction is both (a) interested in this question, and (b) reasonably aligned with your own perspective in the area. Two, find out what that faction says about George W. Bush.

For example, it's easy to imagine upgrading Wikipedia to be uberfactious. Instead of one page for George W. Bush, you could read the story of George W. Bush according to libertarians, according to progressives, according to jihadis, racists, Ford lovers, emacs bigots, and so on - anyone who cares enough to have an opinion about George W. Bush.

One might quickly notice that these pages matched in certain details. For example, jihadis, racists, and progressives probably all agree that George W. Bush was born on July 6, 1946. So all of these groups might contribute to a consensus page, signed by a large number of factions, which might even be similar to today's "objective" page. And since this would probably be the most commonly requested George W. Bush page, it would come up first. An uberfactious Wikipedia doesn't need to be any harder to use than today's neutralist Wikipedia.

However, it would be largely free from "edit wars," because warring gangs would rapidly organize into factions and maintain their own forks of disputed pages. Note the difference between this and the existing bad practice of POV forking, which screws up the Wikipedia namespace. Note also the difference between uberfactiousness and system-level forks such as Conservapedia - there is no easy way to compare the views of Wikipedia and Conservapedia on any topic.

The Uberfact approach should also be effective for much smaller and more ephemeral questions, like "what are today's top 10 cool links?" This is a subjective question, just like "is George W. Bush a tyrant," and it demands a subjective answer.

Link sites like Reddit and Digg tend to suffer a kind of democratic degringolade, in which they start out cool and gradually transition to a point of total lameness. That this is the obvious consequence of universal suffrage on the Web should go without saying, at least to anyone who remembers Usenet in 1992.

Paul Graham's design for Hacker News tries to avoid the degringolade by actually using an oligarchy of human editors, including Paul himself, who will tweak hidden reputation scores. While this will certainly be an improvement on Reddit, I find it excessively algorithmic and antisocial. It has gotten past democracy, but it's not yet unapologetically medieval.

What I'd like to read at Hacker News is simply the set of links that Paul himself finds cool, or would if he had 80 hours a day to surf the net for links. Paul does not, in fact, have 80 hours a day to surf the net for links. But perhaps he has fifteen minutes to rate would-be toadies and henchmen, of whom he has I'm sure a large supply, who could then rate submitted contributions, and so on, producing a kind of ersatz impression of a massively overclocked Paul.

Eric Clapton may be God, but I refuse to believe that anyone else is. So there must be someone who has better taste than Paul. He or she can rise in Paul's hierarchy, then defect and form his own faction - teaching the master a lesson in hacker cool. And so on.

The point of factional reputation is that, since all reputation is in-group reputation, a faction that succumbs to democratic degringolade, or to any other social disease, will simply sink in importance and prestige on the system at large. If the Paul faction is doing just fine, and then Paul drops too much acid and becomes a born-again Mormon, and kills everyone's reputation unless they promote links about the angel Moroni, someone else will step in and feed our need for crack, excuse me, links.

Finally, in the usual tradition of pseudonymous Internet hypesters and vapor-peddlers, I refuse to believe that there are any limits on the power of Uberfact.

The construction of scientific and historical consensus, for example, is a perfect problem for an uberfactious design. Academics have always formed factions, and always will. They have always rated each other, and always will. Academic gang fighting is brutal, and it is conducted with lethal weapons. Get someone's funding pulled and you can kill their career.

In Uberfact, all this fun backstabbing can be totally open and official. There is no reason at all why an uberfactious design can't validate original research or rank researchers - within factions only, of course. Peter Woit versus Luboš Motl? Steve McIntyre versus Michael Mann? Bring it on, baby. These fights are simply gorgeous spectacles, and we should see them up close and personal. Ideally, I could click back and forth between the McIntyre and Mann versions of the hockey stick story, for example. Who needs ESPN Classic?

The same is true for literary critics and writers. Again, writers have always formed gang families and will always form gang families. A factional reputation system would just take existing networks of blurb backscratching and make them official.

And then there's journalism. Ah, journalism! But I'm afraid that's another post.

58 Comments:

Francis said...

Well when you attack democracy you could also attack equality. Tocqueville said something about democracy being obsessed more with equality than with freedom, and this seems true.But isn't your metalanguage going a bit too meta?

And the fact that humans are animals as you state with the gang.party references an old one. Dress it up in scientific language and you have a something that looks like a fact.

And while you're attacking democracy, which isn't so much a strech for the brain as a strech for the heart (people know democracy is shit, they just wont say it because saying it will mean they'll have to deal with it, and deal with unpopulatirity

Isn't the modern and western science structure also a product of christianity?I mean, without the idea of transsubstantiation and the problem of Jesus being a man and the God at the same time could there be an infinitesimal calculus, or non-Euclidian geometry?And jesus being a messanger of GOd and GOd at the same time really helps you, at least in the area of confidence. Islam didn't have this direct link to God, neither does Judaism have it, pantheism reduces God from a person to something different, and when you're a polytheist you've got some sex to do first - then we'll do the math. I mean GOD was here on earth, he didn't speak to some scared messenger (Muhammad) or crazy prophets (Ezekiel) he was here man! - says he through thick marijuana smoke.

Al Ghazzali said that mathematics is the work of the devil, and I've seen enough professors of mathematics to agree with him. (perhaps the only worse people are biologists)See! biologist - the logos of bios, and what is science but the Word of .. someone. Scienmce is mystical thing, as thick as the smoke of hashish-eaters, like the sword between Tristan an Iseult - only there to stimulate the eros into higher and more intense epiphanies.

Okay, I'm thinking that unlike your last proposal, this one is a serious idea rather than satire. And, unlike your other proposals, this one sounds like you could actually make it happen. Do you have any plans to hawk it, borrowing, e.g., from wiki technology?

The only question I can think of now, is there any maximum number of factions or minimum size of factions? I'm just wondering if the numbers would get cumbersome.

I'm trying to picture the front page. Maybe it would say, "View All Factions' Positions on the Great Nebraska Earthquake of 2008". Then the user could pick the Libertarian Socialist Faction, the Socialist Libertarian Faction, or the Anarcho-Syndicalist Faction.

The process by which the truest members of a given faction are promoted is simple and reliable ... people who self-select for the wrong faction are demoted by the local (perhaps tiny) majority.

I'm just not sure how the newbie navigates from between the factions. Are they ranked in overall popularity? I'm just thinking that if the SLF has 1200 members, and the ASF has 14,000,000 members, and the LSF has 4 members, does the latter get kind of lost in the shuffle? Maybe you could rank them by frequency or number of posts/articles/essays rather than by popularity, or do both.

This is another genius-level post. I've often felt annoyed at the way reputation systems have evolved on the web, but you managed to tease out the exact thing wrong with them. And propose to solve it. Way cool.

I wonder if there should be a containment hierarchy among factions (essentially, a coalition feature). Ie, libertarians, objectivists, and formalists may hate each others unprincipled guts but they also probably agree amongst themselves more than with the general population, so the faction manager may wish to support some kind of grouping features. This would also aid the novice in charting out the intellectual territory -- useful for those who are shopping around for a faction to join.

By the way, it looks like some of the very worst of the tribal warriors are male-to-female transsexual academics. Someone wrote a 60-page paper detailing the history of this particular academic catfight, if that's the right term.

The notion of objectivity or neutrality, whether in literature or in journalism, is actually quite new. For most of the history of printed literature, at least, there have been competing opinionated works of supposedly factual reference. Consider theology, at any point from Luther's nailing his theses to the church door to the present. If that is too obvious, consider medicine, the literature of which featured pitched battles between Galenists and Paracelsians throughout the 16th and 17th centuries, between allopaths and homoeopaths in the late 18th and early 19th, much argument over the germ theory of disease in the late 19th, and so on. Every field of knowledge featured a battle of the books.

Journalism as it exists today is the descendant of seventeenth-century pamphleteering, which exemplified the same combative character. For many years, newspapers were founded with the intention of promoting a particular point of view. The names of many newspapers still extant reflect this. We find examples such as the "Democrat-Gazette" in Little Rock, Arkansas, the "Republican-Eagle" in Red Wing, Minnesota, and my own favorite, the "Whig" in Cecil County, Maryland. No one was ever in doubt about the viewpoint he would find in a Hearst paper, or in Col. McCormick's Chicago Tribune, or any of their contemporaries.

The fashion for (purported) objectivity in the world of scholarship and literature probably dates at earliest from the late nineteenth century, by which time the old sectarian animosities of European Christendom were being laid aside in the face of "higher criticism" and the crisis of Protestant faith. In journalism this tendency is even more recent. I suggest it is not much older than the aftermath of World War II, which coincided with the demise of press barons like Hearst and McCormick, and the ascendancy of "professional" management in the news media, more concerned with the maximization of advertising revenues than with the promotion of principles.

A byproduct of this was the abandonment of the editorial stance of the newspapers so managed to the hired help. At the same time, the advent of journalism schools within the university system promoted the idea that newspapering, which was hitherto had been regarded as a somewhat raffish trade, could now be a "profession" as respectable as law or medicine. My paternal grandfather, who published a string of country newspapers, would have enjoyed a good laugh at such pretension.

The pernicious aspect, and the greatest strength, of SVs today (whether academic or journalistic) is their pretense of professionalism and objectivity. Those who run such institutions certainly know that "who controls public opinion controls the state," and also that they are aided in that control by denial of their bias.

Whether called "überfact" or just a reversion to former literary or journalistic practice, honest self-identification according to bias would let the sun shine in, driving away the shadows, and diminishing (if not destroying) the dissemblers' underhanded power.

I'll excuse this one by pointing out that, if democracy actually is nonsense, we're suffering from a serious truth deficit. 9/11 Truthers are one thing - but when you start questioning 7/4, you're into some heavy alternate reality. Here at UR, Philip K. Dick is always in the house.I think you exaggerate how criminal your thoughts are. People have been bemoaning democracy since the days of Athens. Kuehneldt-Leddihn and Burnham wrote for National Review, the "respectable" magazine of the right. Albert Jay Nock and H. L. Mencken wrote for mainstream liberal publications. Thomas Sowell recently (and rather foolishly, in my opinion) wrote favorably of the possibility of a military coup in the United States. Both Leninists and Public Choice scholars look down on democracy.

Typical SVs today, such as Wikipedia or the New York Times, invest great effort in separating fact from opinion (see La Wik's NPOV page). Terms such as "objective" are popular.Do you put "objective" in quotes because you don't think there is any distinction between fact and opinion, the normative and the positive?

And so the democratic state, which after all is a state and must defend itself like any other, tends to favor objective SVs over those which propagate explicit perspective.I'm not sure about that. Is the New York Times that dominant over The New Republic, The Nation, The American Prospect, The Washington Monthly, The Weekly Standard and Reason? When I watch writers from such opinion magazines on bloggingheads.tv they often laugh at people like the NYT's Thomas Friedman and David Brooks as well as the Washington Post's "relentlessly centrist" David Broder as pap for less sophisticated folks, just as the NYT and Washington Post might look down on Fox News.

So a tradition of neutrality has the inevitable effect of centralizing and standardizing opinion. A European or American intellectual of 1907 would be shocked and appalled by the society of 2007 in many ways, but I think his general impression would be one of great mental conformity.I don't think I'd agree. Singularitarians are new and seem impossible without the internet, so are furries/otherkin. Leftist movements are notorious for their fractures and there have been a lot of them which have grown and fractured since then. I agree with Converse that the bulk of people don't have what could be called a political ideology, but there are a lot more of what he calls ideologues that do nowadays that have resulted in a wider array of thought.

For Uberfact, what really matters is that objectivity is not what users want.This is already the case, hence the success of Fox News. It doesn't have to tell people that Iraq was responsible for 9/11, people who believe that will watch the channel and have their opinion strengthened even without such claims being made by it.

As a user, what I want from Uberfact is an infinite extension of my own personality.No you don't, most of us have boring personalities. We want something more interesting.

If I ask Uberfact some question Q, the best answer I can possibly receive is the answer I myself would produce, if I had infinite time to research Q and knew all the information that anyone knows about it.Given those advantages you would probably think more like Bryan Caplan's "enlightened public".

But if my question is "is George W. Bush a tyrant?", I am SOL. Nobody is going to ask that question, they already have an opinion they believe is right. As I mentioned before, it is unfortunate that "tyrant" has come to indicate an opinion rather than an objective statement of how a leader attained power. If we still spoke that way Wikipedia would likely contain category tags for tyrants, and Bush of course would not be listed.

What I want to know is: if I knew everything that anyone knows about George W. Bush, and everything that anyone knows about the history and etymology of the word "tyrant," would I decide that the former is a case of the latter?You are never going to have that because there are always going to be people with information other don't have that don't contribute. Even Wikipedia can list what others have said about Bush in a perfectly objective manner, which is not too far off from your Uberfact idea.

Surely, if Uberfact can answer this question - and answer it with a mouse click, not a week of research - merely objective questions, like where the tyrant was born, will be no sweat at all.The people who want to contribute opinions will congregate at Uberfact while people who want to contribute objective facts will congregate at Wikipedia. Wikipedia will also be a more popular source and will be cited in internet arguments far more often.

the epistemological landmine of distinguishing the two.It's not an epistemological landmine at all. It's a very simple concept where is your ought and is are different and any mention of "the good" is opinion. The one tricky part are relative things like "a lot", "many" or "few", which does not a landmine make. There can be incomplete and misleading or even untrue positive statements, but they are different from opinions.

As an Uberfact user, what I get is my interpretation of reality.You already have your interpretation of reality, what you get from Uberfact is not yours unless it was you who wrote it.

Suppose my interpretation of reality is bad? Suppose I am simply wrong? Suppose my opinions are stupid? Well, of course, most people with stupid opinions are perfectly happy to live with them. Indeed they tend to insist on it.Those sound like the people who will prefer Uberfact or Conservapedia to Wikipedia.

But some of us are so crazy that we actually like to improve our understanding of the world. Uberfact would certainly be defective if it didn't assist in this process.Wikipedia sounds sufficient for that already, adding opinions is not going to help your understanding of the world other than knowing that so and so believes this and that, which Wikipedia already features.

Therefore, Uberfact should tell me not just what I think, but what others think.The former you can only get from yourself, the latter you can get from Wikipedia.

Furthermore, a graph is a somewhat obtuse representation of the reputation system within these gangs. Sure, every tree is a graph, but if all your graphs are trees, use a tree. Human status systems are without exception hierarchical. They have regal aristocrats at the top, arrogant henchmen right below them, and so on down to cringing, boot-licking peasants.Actual organizations perhaps resemble that, but not ideological factions. Those are more like clusters where every peasant can believe himself a king. It is true that he has no power if other people decline to pay attention to him, but the same is true of the kings. Nick Szabo can't do a damn thing to Mencius Moldbug, nor vice-versa.

The idea of factional reputation is that, at least while the New Socialist Man is still stuck at version 0.43, we can actually work with human nature as it is, not as it should be, and build Uberfact around these notorious primate pathologies.I remember when you said Hal Varian's majoritarianism was avoiding bias by rolling around in them (I think the idea is that they cancel out, but since I believe Varian to be significantly less biased than average I don't think it would help), and that description sounds even more apt for your system.

First, we are going to compromise Uberfact's feature space a little. It will only work, at least work well, for those of us who are basically conformists. For example, I am a formalist and a neocameralist, and while there may be one or two of the former by now, I am quite sure I'm the only one of the latter. So Uberfact won't work for me, or for other eccentric weirdos.Everyone believes themselves to be an independent, free-thinking non-conformist. Admitting conformity would be a truly eccentric thing to do.

Notice these group labels. In Uberfact, these are called factions. Factions are groups of people who see the world in the same way.Will post-utopians be included?

Kochian libertariansKoch was not an intellectual. I say he does not get a faction.

As a user of Uberfact, you have access to all content produced by all factions. Your process for answering a question, such as "is George W. Bush a tyrant," is in two steps. One, figure out what faction is both (a) interested in this question, and (b) reasonably aligned with your own perspective in the area. Two, find out what that faction says about George W. Bush.A tricky one might be "Is George Bush a conservative? Are people who say yes true conservatives? How about true Scotsmen?". I remember when you said that Bush and the neo-cons are not conservatives. This is a common belief among paleos, and as a paleo-libertarian I am partial to it except that it assumes "conservative" has some platonic meaning, which I guess would mean all the progressives of today are not "liberals" and must give their name to libertarians, who must in turn give their name to the offspring of Proudhon.

For example, it's easy to imagine upgrading Wikipedia to be uberfactious. Instead of one page for George W. Bush, you could read the story of George W. Bush according to libertarians, according to progressives, according to jihadis, racists, Ford lovers, emacs bigots, and so on - anyone who cares enough to have an opinion about George W. Bush.Wikipedia already features the opinions held by various people on Bush.

Link sites like Reddit and Digg tend to suffer a kind of democratic degringolade, in which they start out cool and gradually transition to a point of total lameness. That this is the obvious consequence of universal suffrage on the Web should go without saying, at least to anyone who remembers Usenet in 1992.There's no reason why web-sites can't exclude more. I think the admins just generally prefer not to.

Interesting notion. However, I think the notion of making different factions' contributions and ratings mutually independent is IMO a bad idea. Let anyone rate any article, but let ratings themselves carry factional signatures. This way, with each item, no matter by whom produced, we would associate a vector space of rankings, each faction being its own vector axis. Then a user could simply decide on their own vector composition (0.9*Rothbardians, 0.8*Hayekians, 0.6*neo-utilitarians, etc.) and so determine their very own personalized rating of all contributions.

The blogosphere is of course great, but it's not really collaborative. A group of interlinked blogs is not capable of synthesizing a single perspective that is larger than any of them.

At present, the Western intellectual world has one giant Orthodoxy and a whole lot of carping critics of all different hues. As I can testify, one of the hardest parts of abandoning the Orthodoxy is navigating the vast sea of available heresies.

What the world needs is a large set of smaller competing orthodoxies, all trying to beat each other out as representations of reality. Rather like the intellectual world of the 19th century. Rather unlike ours.

For me, as a reader, perspectives are like varieties of wine. I like Cabernet and I like pinot noir. I am not interested in an algorithmic blend of the two. So, similarly, I'd rather see pure Hayek and pure Rothbard than some vector between the two.

Of course as a contributor, my Rothbardian-ness is not mine to judge, but that of the Rothbardistas, whose orthodoxy I'm sure will be quite venomous.

And as for echo chambers, I'd hate to be stuck in one, but I like seeing what others produce. Of course, I want the chamber itself to reinforce its best parts, not its worst, but that is what competition is for.

Wasn't "Republican" actually originally the name of a newspaper? One that was owned by Medill, maybe? I am blanking on the source for this, and Wikipedia is unaccountably unhelpful.

I am definitely in agreement that objective, "responsible" journalism is new, and also that it is far more pernicious than the yellow journalism it replaced. It is effectively official journalism of the old "Gazette" form. In fact I think it deserves a color all its own - I favor gray. But the subject definitely deserves its own post.

Ideally someone else would build it - my plate is rather full at the moment! But I realize this is selfish of me.

You definitely need a reputation system between factions as well as within factions, but it can be very crude - a simple measure of activity is enough. If the truth cannot be found within the top 10 contenders by mere popularity, the human race is more screwed than I thought.

I wonder if there should be a containment hierarchy among factions (essentially, a coalition feature). Ie, libertarians, objectivists, and formalists may hate each others unprincipled guts but they also probably agree amongst themselves more than with the general population, so the faction manager may wish to support some kind of grouping features. This would also aid the novice in charting out the intellectual territory -- useful for those who are shopping around for a faction to join.

Yes, definitely - this feature kept popping in and out of the system, but when you put it this way I realize that it's pretty useful. However, such a hierarchy should not imply that reputation is portable between factions.

For me, as a reader, perspectives are like varieties of wine. I like Cabernet and I like pinot noir. I am not interested in an algorithmic blend of the two.

No problem. Then you get to define a vector composition which gives the weight of 1 to Rothbardians or Hayekians or what have you, and 0 to everyone else. The modification I proposed would make the system infinitely flexible. You are all about more choice, right?.. Well, there it is.

Besides, the perspectives would still be distinct. Each faction -- anyone at all -- could fork a topic on their own. It's the reputation scores that would be composable, so as to help the reader better navigate their way through different -- and just as importantly, the not-so-different -- perspectives. Maybe Hayekians didn't do a writeup on the utility of liberty, but did give the neo-Utilitarian article on that topic a high score... that's a very useful and important fact about that particular topic fork, a fact which the reader should be able to consider in their topic search.

As to looking into others' echo chambers -- good point. Yes, that would indeed render the whole project rather interesting after all. To each their own I guess. Some people will populate their echo chambers, and some will be eternal voyeurs.

I believe the name "Republican" was suggested (as applied to the present party) by the newpaper publisher Horace Greeley, who wrote in an editorial in June 1854 of the party formed earlier that year in Ripon, Wisconsin that "...we think some simple name like 'Republican' would more fitly designate those who had united to restore the Union to its true mission of champion and promulgator of liberty rather than propagandist of slavery." Greeley's paper was the New York Tribune, and during most of his period of ownership it was strongly Republican in its politics. I believe any paper called the "Republican" must postdate Greeley's christening of the party by that name.

Hey, Mencius, Eliezer Yudkowsky has just attacked democratic fundamentalism in an Overcoming Bias post. So zero chance of him defending democracy here like you challenged.

Of course as a contributor, my Rothbardian-ness is not mine to judge, but that of the Rothbardistas, whose orthodoxy I'm sure will be quite venomous.But who decides who are the true Rothbardistas?

And their like is no longer to be found there. Whatever the noose is doing, it's certainly not loosening.Reason, Chronicles, The American Conservative and various other magazines didn't exist back then. They had to work there together.

I'm not sure what motivates the DC libertarians, but since the people at Cato and Reason clearly consider all non-Kochians to be wackos, they'd hate to be stuck in a faction together, I fear.There's no such thing as a "Kochian", and Cato/Reason don't seem nearly as intolerant as you claim. Read "Radicals for Capitalism" by Brian Dougherty (who has worked for both organizations). He seems to have a rather positive attitude to most of the varieties of libertarianism, including the ones hostile to the more establishment or mainstream forms. He does get critical of Rothbard during the hook-up with paleoconservatives, possibly because Brian doesn't think much of cultural conservatism. It is for that reason that he seems to have disdain for many of the more moderate libertarian minarchists of the 40s and 50s.

Anyone you entrust with the power to judge this distinction is capable of abusing it.Anyone we entrusted with exclusive power to provide shoes would be likely to abuse it. We still have free speech and a free press so I don't think we're in as much danger as you.

That's why I'm suggesting building actual organizations.Wikipedia seems to be too much of a sprawl to be described well with the term "organization" (the Wikimedia foundation is different). Factions (which seem to be ideologies as you describe them) aren't organizations either. How does your Uberfact provide a hierarchy for factions?

Do you really think that if Wikipedia had ideological forks, all the George W. Bush pages would be the same?No, most of them would neglect to include certain information. With Wikipedia you get both fans and foes of Bush contributing to the same page.

Don't you notice a difference between the Wikipedia and Conservapedia pages here?I've never looked at Conservapedia, but all the conservatives I've heard from say it sucks. I predict it will remain far less popular than either Uncyclopedia or Encyclopaedia Dramatica.

As astute a parody of partisan politics as rotary management was of American democracy (if a bit too thinly veiled). Unfortunately, those you'd most hope would use Uberfact would avoid it entirely, because it requires them to say publicly what they would only say behind closed doors.

Thankfully, security by obscurity has been shown to be especially vulnerable to astute reverse engineers . . .

It's been a few days since I have read the post so I will be purposefully vague. Isn't the Uberfact proposal just an evaluation of the current state of the media? Television, for example, must appeal to the masses. If one wants to read what conservatives in red states, such as Texas or Virginia, believe to be correct interpretation of some political affair, one would turn on FoxNews. FoxNews exists precisely because they reflect what those red state individuals desire. They present the world to them in accordance with the way they want to see the world. If one wants to understand the perspective of a conservative businessman they simply read the Wall Street journal. Again, the Wall Street journal is successful because it has a base which believes that its opinions are credible interpretations of reality.There are a multitude of publications which cater to specific groups. Publications which would not survive unless they actually reflect the ideologies of their chosen consumers. Don't your factions already exist without the general framework?

inspectordeck, I think the problem with the commercial media is that they are only likely to appeal to fairly large factions. Scanning the television options doesn't produce a Syndicalist Television, a Single Tax Television, a Trotskyite Television, or an Objectivist Television. For someone who isn't an establishment liberal or a neo-conservative, the choices are pretty thin.

Furthermore, the labels aren't as meaningful without survey-type numbers attached. We may not all agree on what it means to be a Libertarian or a Socialist or a stalwart for the Sensible Party, but if people were required to self-identify when rating policy positions, the meanings would start to crystallize pretty quickly.

I don't think opinions are too terribly different from anything else that clusters. There may not be a hard-and-fast definition of an electrician, but if a bunch of articles on electrical installation were written and rated by people required by the system to self-identify as electricians or not, we would see pretty quickly if they no more than average, and how much.

On the whole, I'm in favor of systematically studying opinion clusters. Uberfact supplies tools to do so that haven't existed in the past.

Aren't the survey numbers reflected in the popularity of the television channel/periodical/blog/commercial website? You are right when you say the main stream media doesn't represent the variety of opinions but there are other mediums of communication.It does require some searching and this is perhaps where Uberfact is useful. Even in this regard though, the difficulty in finding some informs me a great deal about its societal standing.

The flat-tax group,for example, is not well-represented on television and that says a lot more than what numbers on the internet could. It reflects not only the support for such a group but how far from the center the group is.

Also a more practical problem with Uberfact, isn't the internet as a whole still unrepresentative. Technophobes definitely won't have any faction, though they could make up a large portion of the population, hypothetically.

I certainly see that your UI is a general case of mine and thus strictly more expressive. However, in UI, raw power is not always the thing.

If you were not interested in poking into others' echo chambers, you wouldn't be reading my blog! But most people are not so interested. Knowing that they are reading a "safe" and predictable source is very comforting to them.

As for those of us who are interested in a multiperspective view, at least for me, a sense of consistency is useful in seeing where others are coming from. So I prefer pure echo-chamber results as well.

Thus my lack of interest in personalization algorithms on the reader side. But, of course, if the DB is public, you can build any reader you like...

I hadn't seen that piece, but it's good. "Wikicrats" is about right. The problem with Wikipedia is that it needs power-trippers in order to maintain standards, but it has no control over where they will take it.

If one wants to understand the perspective of a conservative businessman they simply read the Wall Street journal. Again, the Wall Street journal is successful because it has a base which believes that its opinions are credible interpretations of reality.

Actually, it's only the WSJ's editorial page that is conservative. The rest of the paper is the usual J-school product.

The flat-tax group,for example, is not well-represented on television and that says a lot more than what numbers on the internet could. It reflects not only the support for such a group but how far from the center the group is.

Indeed. But suppose the "center" is arbitrary? Suppose it has no relation to reality, that it's just a random outcome of history? Suppose opinions that are closer to the center are no more likely to be right than ones that aren't?

Oh, I've read Doherty. He's definitely a Kochian.Watch this. He self-describes as a Rothbardian, which is what I suspected reading his book. He's not into paleo stuff, but I don't think Walter Block necessarily is either. Block rejects both Hoppe's right and Long's left for Tucker-esque "plumb-line" anarcho-capitalism.

We have an official press and an official education system.The state is enmeshed with education, but not the press with the exception of public broadcasting.

Factions are governed, or at least constituted, by those who found them. And maintaining ideological discipline is crucial to party organization. The Communists understood this well.It is a well known fact that "you can't punch someone over the internet". Most communist parties were not so much political parties as they were revolutionary gangs (hence the saying "The Communist party is not a party like other parties"). Even in America during the 60s they fought Larouchies in the streets with nunchucks! How will that be replicated on Uberfact?

Indeed. But suppose the "center" is arbitrary? Suppose it has no relation to reality, that it's just a random outcome of history? Suppose opinions that are closer to the center are no more likely to be right than ones that aren't?Opinions that are not believed cannot be expressed. Furthermore, much of politics is about normative values, which as an emotivist I believe are completely devoid of any objective truth value.

The state is enmeshed with education, but not the press with the exception of public broadcasting.

Oh, no. The ties are subtle, but quite extensive. Leaking - the use of unofficial or anonymous sources - is the principal privilege of the official press, but there are many others.

He self-describes as a Rothbardian, which is what I suspected reading his book.

If Doherty's a Rothbardian, I'm an antelope. Don't libertarians have any ideological discipline these days? What happened to all those good old intra-Party struggles?

It is a well known fact that "you can't punch someone over the internet". Most communist parties were not so much political parties as they were revolutionary gangs (hence the saying "The Communist party is not a party like other parties"). Even in America during the 60s they fought Larouchies in the streets with nunchucks! How will that be replicated on Uberfact?

Expulsion from the Party, suspension of privileges and personal ostracism. Nunchucks or no, it's not hard to get the ol' ape group dynamics going...

Leaking - the use of unofficial or anonymous sources - is the principal privilege of the official press, but there are many others.Is the unofficial press prohibited from that?

If Doherty's a Rothbardian, I'm an antelope. Don't libertarians have any ideological discipline these days? What happened to all those good old intra-Party struggles?What is wrong with Doherty? Also, in the book he says the LP is the bizarre sideshow to the libertarian movement.

Expulsion from the Party, suspension of privileges and personal ostracism. Nunchucks or no, it's not hard to get the ol' ape group dynamics going...I can see how you can can ostracize over the internet, since it only requires that you change your own behavior. I don't know how power struggles would get resolved. Will the gans on Uberfact be formal?

When was the last time you heard of someone leaking to a blogger?Does Matt Drudge count? There have been plenty of instances in which a leaker had their own blog.

He's a DC libertarian. Isn't that enough?No. Rothbard was personally afraid of flying, but I don't know where he said you couldn't reside in D.C. Seriously, is there anything Doherty has written that is heretical from the orthodox Rothbardian point of view?

Almost certainly. At least, I think, the formal ones would outcompete the informal ones.How will they be able to formalize without nunchucks? Will there be any features of Uberfact that will help them do so? And shouldn't formal governments outcompete informal governments, yet we see the latter variety everywhere on earth?

Drudge is an awful institution. He combines all the worst aspects of journalism and the Internet.

But his leaks, which are often inaccurate, tend to be at least proper leaks, ie, data that people don't want to release. Whereas almost every story you see on the front page of the NY Times involves systematic undisclosed release.

Of course, anyone can live wherever he wants. Not all DC libertarians live in DC. What they have in common is that they want to reform the present system of government in a libertarian direction, rather than simply abolishing it. It seems to them that the former has a much higher chance of succeeding. But they are, in my opinion, wrong.

How will they be able to formalize without nunchucks? Will there be any features of Uberfact that will help them do so?

Smart digital contracts can be used to constitute any kind of an institution. And should be. See under: Nick Szabo, Daniel Nagy...

But his leaks, which are often inaccurate, tend to be at least proper leaks, ie, data that people don't want to release. Whereas almost every story you see on the front page of the NY Times involves systematic undisclosed release.That strikes me as a distinction without distinction. Someone wanted the information released or they wouldn't have given it to him.

What they have in common is that they want to reform the present system of government in a libertarian direction, rather than simply abolishing it.Ludwig von Mises: D.C libertarian. Also, I don't recall where B.D said he wanted to reform rather than abolish. As an anarchist, the latter would actually seem more likely.

It seems to them that the former has a much higher chance of succeeding. But they are, in my opinion, wrong.There have been many revolutions, but most did not make things any better. As you said, only one ever truly was glorious. But among the first world nations of today, I'd say abolishing the government is out of the question. Perhaps France will transition to the Sixth Republic, but it won't necessarily be much different from the previous ones.

Smart digital contracts can be used to constitute any kind of an institution. And should be. See under: Nick Szabo, Daniel Nagy...This is the kind of thing you should have mentioned in your explanation of Uberfact. Just introducing that to Wikipedia would shake things up without adding any sort of factional component.

That strikes me as a distinction without distinction. Someone wanted the information released or they wouldn't have given it to him.

The relationship between the press and various civil servants in various agencies is highly regularized and conventional, although still entirely informal (in fact, entirely illegal). I don't think anyone has this kind of relationship with Drudge or his ilk, though no doubt over time something such might develop. The problem is that the official press and its contacts have de facto immunity, whereas a leak to the likes of Drudge may actually generate "plumbing" activity. Look at the whole Wilson-Plame comedy.

Ludwig von Mises: D.C libertarian. Also, I don't recall where B.D said he wanted to reform rather than abolish. As an anarchist, the latter would actually seem more likely.

Mises was a man from another world and another time, and considering that there was no libertarian establishment at all in his day, his perspectives cannot reasonably be ascribed to opportunism.

Anyone can call himself an anarchist. The word means nothing to me. Doherty is not a thinker, and I have no idea what he thinks. All I know is what crowd he hangs out with.

But among the first world nations of today, I'd say abolishing the government is out of the question.

I don't think anyone has this kind of relationship with Drudge or his ilk, though no doubt over time something such might develop.I don't think you actually have any knowledge about that sort of thing.

The problem is that the official press and its contacts have de facto immunity, whereas a leak to the likes of Drudge may actually generate "plumbing" activity. Look at the whole Wilson-Plame comedy.Judy Miller of the NYT is held in jail while Robert Novak walks free? I don't exactly understand what the implications are supposed to be.

Mises was a man from another world and another time, and considering that there was no libertarian establishment at all in his day, his perspectives cannot reasonably be ascribed to opportunism.I don't think you know enough about many of the people you talk about to say what their motives are.

Anyone can call himself an anarchist. The word means nothing to me. Doherty is not a thinker, and I have no idea what he thinks. All I know is what crowd he hangs out with.If you have no idea what he thinks, why go on about him? Like you I don't consider him to be my kind of libertarian but I don't stick him in a box without knowing a damn thing about him.

Regime change, however, is not.By that do you mean election, impeachment or invasion by an occupying power?

Um, Carl Bernstein? The Pentagon Papers? In practice, the law today turns out to be that you can leak to the left, but not to the right.This is the kind of thing that would get you laughed at by people who don't already share your political views (Hopefully Anonymous has jumped on both me and Robin Hanson for libertarianism, without ever critiquing libertarianism itself, but I think you'd like him). Judy Miller was only in prison for refusing to reveal her source, and to that we can compare the San Francisco kid who refused to turn over video of a protest. Scooter Libby took the fall for Cheney and got a slap on the wrist. He even had all the establishment liberals on his side, that goodest of samaritans.

Whatever works, man. I think you're forgetting the option of a military coup.I thought you dismissed the possibility of Red Government taking over a little while back, which is why you focus on the Brahmin's power so it can be formalized? Don't tell me you merely like excoriating your ideological opponents!

A judicial coup would also be very effective.Can you think of any judge-ocracies other than Iran? I don't think we'd be like Iran, but it is interesting how unusual their government is.

But if we have to be occupied by the Chinese army, I say bring it on.China has made impressive gains, but from the hell of maoism. I believe the "foot vote" of emmigrants/immigrants is still heavily in the U.S' favor over China and I predict it will remain so for quite some time. I think they've gone up a bit in the latest Fraser Index but not by much.

I forgot to link to this above, but here is the thread where HA goes after my libertarianism without politics even having been mentioned. He just jumps right out their and tells you your beliefs are incorrect and serve only as sexual signals or whatnot, which is one of the reasons I like him.